In my paper I am attempting (1) to challenge some of the modernist assumptions underlying the historicism of traditional medieval studies and the place of such studies within the academy, (2) using Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "the middle"and Benjamin's call for a materialist historiography in "the time of the now" to suggest some ways that rethinking how we do history might bring pre- and post-modern projects into useful dialogue, (3) by way of illustration, to describe how my own work on Chaucer attempts to queer the middle ages as well as to historicize postmodernity.
The question of a future for medieval studies, or the lack of one, is integrally connected to a set of temporal relationships defining modernity. Since its first definitions as a historical period, and as "pre-modern," the Middle Ages has stood in a certain queer position vis-a-vis "modernity." Excluded from "our" world as its pre-history, the Middle Ages is seen as radically other, an "alterity" opposed to "modernity." Even those periodic reclaimings of the medieval that mark the history of Western culture—by, for instance, the Romantics and pre-Raphaelites, or by Robertsonian medievalists—depend upon this otherness, tending to embrace the medieval in order to disavow the modern. The historicism defining modernity, along with maintaining the radical pastness of the past, also insists on a set of causal connections linking the present with its foundations in the past and on the radical otherness of a premodern past before such foundations. From the point of view of such a modernist historicism, both the pre-modern and postmodern identify a strangely analogous position of lack: the former all pastness, forever other to the present moment we find ourselves in and outside of its future; the latter all presentness, cut off from historical causality and its ability to predicate a meaningful future.
Thus, despite the immensely valuable work of historical recuperation that traditional medieval studies has produced, its place in the modernist project produced a medieval studies dangerously isolated and often perceived as irrelevant to the concerns of the larger academy. We need, then, to rethink how we do history in order to challenge a modernist historicism's colonization of the past in order to naturalize a set of practices in the present. Can we encounter the "middle" of "the middle ages" or the "pre" of "pre-modern" in more dynamic ways so that doing history will not reassert a stabilizing periodization or set of foundational categories, but rather, in encountering "the otherness" of medieval systems of thought, we might also encounter that which has had to be left behind in assuming modern identities. Historicizing the premodern in this way disputes the naturalness of modern categories, exposes them as new facts, and helps constitute our present subjects-in-process in new ways. To that extent the premodern may parallel the postmodern, and historicization, rather than intensifying boundaries, may encourage a productive crossing and recrossing of them.
Recent queer theory, in its troubling of sex, gender, and sexuality boundaries, offers one methodology less likely, at least at the moment, to colonize and erase the differences of both the pre- and post-modern body. Emphasizing the performativity of gendered and sexualized identities, and stressing the impossibility of proving sex, sexuality, and gender by recourse to a prior, foundational biological body, queer theory tries to map a more dynamic, less assured account of the body in motion with prevailing discourses of power. Moreover, in seeking such destabilizing dis-identifications, the queer project finds points of intersection with feminist and post-colonial critique and inquiry.
Such theory has emphasized how the definition of any (hegemonic, acceptable, normative) terrain depends upon exclusions. No matter how abjected, demonized, or ignored, the excluded terms always haunt the realm of inclusion, as necessary to its definition. Modernity, defined against the ancient and the medieval, always somehow depends upon certain understandings of those excluded terms, and the postmodern, separating itself from the modern, is itself necessarily entangled as well with what the modern has excluded. Queering the Middle Ages, then, can not only help us rethink that era with the tools of postmodern inquiry but also, through new understandings of the medieval, help us rethink the modern and postmodern. The historicizing work of a queer/lesbian/gay medieval studies can help bring the (post)modern into new confrontations with its historical others, to further, in other words, a project of historicizing postmodernity.
Using contemporary queer and postcolonial theory, as well as recent historical and cultural studies exploring the social hybridity of Chaucer's own situation and that of his audience, I am trying to resist both the stabilizing reproduction of a canonical "Father Chaucer" and the fiction of a pure path of resistance to canonicity (either by constructing a "resistant" author figure or by simply rejecting an oppressive "traditional" author). Instead I seek a new historicization of "the great author" by understanding the historical forces (both within Chaucer's lifetime and especially in the tradition that quickly develops after his death) that have produced such an author function. In doing so, I hope that we will be able to fantasize another "Chaucer" before canonicity and to recognize the perverse dynamic at work within the Canterbury Tales. Even as the Tales are responding to and attempting to represent a new symbolic order of modernity that is coming into being in late medieval England—organized around a new sense of individual and national identity—they incorporate the anxieties that such a departure from the past demands. It is this queer performativity that I want to attend to in my readings of the Canterbury Tales.
In the remainder of the paper, I will attempt to bring into queer contiguity two quotations—one from John Preston's introduction to his anthology of gay porn, Flesh and the Word; the other, from the prologue to the Miller's Tale (I.3172-77)—in order to promote that kind of rhizomatic connection that Deleuze and Guattari have argued as the best path of resistance to the stultifying binaries established by and perpetuating "tradition."